Damage: I am familiar with that routine. I find Carlin to be very entertaining. Carlin gets a little raunchy on occasion and there are no sacred cows, or anything else sacred, to him. He may have an agenda and it might just be, "Make everything you can imagine funny." If he picks on something dear to my heart, I usually still laugh -- and sometimes I learn.

@Philip (last page)I'd say the standard of food around here has improved measurably over the last ten years. You can even get cabbage that is not over boiled now. Still, I'd love to try a gastronomic tour stateside. New Orleans would be cool I think (I love extra spicy) as well as Texas and New York. I'll add deep fried meats to my wishlist.

it's generally raining, but my attitude was sunny. I had never seen my name that way. I always am interested in, and often amused or bemused by misreadings and typos in any setting. That was particularly interesting to me given the state of things around here lately.

I missed the latest "big" storm. Unannounced, it blew in at 161 m.p.h. on the local high ground that sports our local radio tower. The tower made it through the blow, but succumbed to a loss of power later that week. We are lost without our local radio.

call_copse: A gastronomic tour stateside would blow you away. In addition to ethnic foods such as Mexican, Cajun, English (yes English) and etc., we have great regional foods. There is a major division between the South and the North. Some of that has leveled off. In my youth I could tell whether I was in the South or the North by ordering breakfast sausage. In the South, I would get fried spicy pork patties. In the North I would get links, something like English breakfast sausage, but spicier. That is how I learned that Maryland is in the South. It is not only below the Mason-Dixon line, at the time, they served pork patty sausages at breakfast. The above test no longer works.

Paula Deen (Google her) is the artery clogging, diabetes inducing, wonderful food icon of the South. Julia Childs was the food icon of the North. Perhaps Martha Stewart is now.

Come to Texas for beef barbeque. I recommend Alabama for pork barbeque. I skip the cabrito barbeque but many like it.

This is an English Language discussion, I remind myself. So will not continue.

I have fried a turkey for the last few years. I did not fry one this year, though, since I had no family coming in this year. Fried turkey is delicious! You have to be very careful and know what you're doing or you'll burn yourself badly. It goes without saying you shouldn't even try to fry one inside any kind of structure or you may burn that down, too. Here in the Deep South we have an overabundance of wild turkeys. I was deer hunting on some private land my wife's family owns. About sunup, I heard the turkeys start gobbling. It was just light enough for me to see them roosting in a tree across the field. They began to fly down to the ground and began moving toward me. Alas, all I had was a deer rifle, no shotgun or anything small caliber enough for turkey. Thirty-five wild turkeys passed by the tree I was in. It's a beautiful thing to see animals in the wild.

Be who you are and say what you feel in your heart. Because those that matter, don't mind. And those that mind, don't matter.